The Greatness of The Magnificence Presents: Neil Young

The coach pulled into Bristol and I found The Cube Cinema easily.

I'd return later to find the door open and a guy surrounded by stage stuff, cables, microphones and the other usual tech paraphanalia. I walked over to the guitar player who was singing a familiar song and introduced myself. "Hi, you must be Jesse, I'm Richard from London". He nodded, said hello and indicated I should sit down on one of the cinema's red velvet seats.

It seemed tropical inside already and I began to sweat inside my retro-denim shirt, I could feel the perspiration trickle down my back. I got up and introduced myself to the guy setting up a drum kit. "Hi, I'm Richard, a drummer from London, can I help you at all?" He said he was Tony and didn't need any help, so I thought I'd relax a little and watch it all unfold from the red seat in the front row. When he was finished he came over and we had a little chat about whether or not I could use my bass drum pedal on his kit and also if I could use my new 'soft attack' lightening rods. He was okay about it. "yeah use whatever you like" Perfect. Now I'd just see when John and Sol would turn up.

I checked my mobile and there was a message from John, saying he'd be there very soon. Tony walked up the few steps to the stage and a rather large guy was plugging his guitar in and Tony did a flurry around his tom-toms. In a few moments they were playing loud rock and roll and I realised my approach to drums has changed a lot over the years and I no longer feel the need to play loud. Instead I like to listen and augment. This more sensitive approach seemed in tune with Jesse and he invited me to sit in on his sound check which I was happy to do. It is always very strange playing someone else's drums. Everything felt slightly wrong and I struggled with some adjustments to the cymbals and bass drum to try to make the thing fit me as a player, rather than trying to fit my limbs to IT. Seeing as the drummer is usually always sitting, one has to ensure you are comfortable reaching everything with ease.

The musicians due to play that evening gradually assembled and sound checks began in earnest. By this point I was still wondering how we would end each of the songs that had been hot on my iPod for a week and were floating around my head in a rather annoying way. The sound check was rather lost on me as I couldn't hear the vocals and so much wanted to, there was no foldback for the drummer, which I accepted but felt awkward about, as I don't like playing too loud now, how will I possibly know?

I was originally due to play on four songs, hich I had learned from the Neil Young recordings John gave me. Winterlong and Out On The Weekend with John [guitar & vocals], Sol[bass], Sally [backing vocals] and also on Southern man and Ohio with Tony [guitar & vocals] Sol[bass] Ruth & Sally [backing vocals] Pete [guitar] Jesse [guitar & vocals] and John? [guitar & vocals]

I wanted to additionally document the evening's sounds and visuals, so I had brought my DAT Walkman and my Canon digital IXUS. I had so much to do and was rather frantically trying to delegate the DAT machine and camera to others until I realised that unless I did things myself, something would be bound to go wrong! I bumped into Jesse who asked me to plug in the DAT machine to the mixing desk, something I had certainly not planned to do and had not brought the appropriate connecting cable, but I decided to go up to the mixing desk anyway to meet the sound engineer and find a safe place to set up the DAT gear.
By the time I had everything up and running no primadonnas [see image above] were already half way through a song. They performed Like a hurricane, Heart of Gold & Rockin' in the Free World.

The Cube was becoming full of people and I saw a few friends had turned up to see the performances. I managed to spend most of the first half running about like a blue arsed fly between stage and mixing desk, trying to press pause and record and attempt to get the recording levels right.
Something had to give and in the end I lost a whole acoustic performance of Sugar Mountain from Kat [guitar & vocals] and Charlotte [guitar & vocals] simply because I didn't press the pause release button!

This was followed by an acoustic gem by Jesse's partner Kate in which she forgot some lyrics and laughed it off and I found to my astonishment the audience laughed with her too - this made me instantly at ease! She began again and accompanied her lovely singing with a banjo.

Next came Tony who sang Sharpshooter with a very convincing Neil Young-like nasal sound. He then was accompanied on Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Lucy and both had told me earlier I may be required to add a rimshot on every off-beat. Then Tony called out from the stage "where is Richard... Richard rimshot, where is he?" I climbed down from the mixing desk to the stage to add a little light hi-hat and the required rimshot to help them keep time.

Next came John [vocoder] & Sally [backing vocals] singing a trippy version of Powderfinger which sounded amazingly different to the original.

Jesse then came on with his band performing helpless, which featured Kate [Vocals] & Kat [Vocals] plus two unknown musician [Bass], unknown musician [drums] I recognised Jesse's naturally effortless guitar and singing style... The band sounded like they had played together before too!

I was then ushered onto the stage by the slightly alarming John FW, we had done his sound check together earlier. Not knowing the song, I quickly asked Jesse how it went and he just played a chord or two and we were off! My My, Hey Hey (out of The Blue) was probably most fun because it was totally improvised and went down well with the audience, there was an electric guitar solo too. The singer John FW had clearly won them over with his colourful/manic stage persona!

Matt Douglass came on next with Tell Me Why and When you dance I Can Really Love, which had an authentic NY vocal sound and was well strummed but timing left little awkward gaps occasionally. The vocals featured a harmony sung by a singer whose name I don't know.

Next up John, who before introducing Winterlong was rather unfairly heckled by someone in the audience, whilst trying to acknowledge Jesse's superb efforts in organising the event and coming over specially from Paris. John's voice sounded a little strained reaching the high notes, Sally was singing some occasionally tasty "oooh shal alala las" my drumming went slightly AWOL too, but I liked John's ending fade out coda to the audience "yeah its all about love!"

Out On The Weekend, with the same line up, got off to a better start and was the right tempo and the audience did hush after a little encouragement, Shhh! was heard clearly on the tape!

Cinnamon Girl is another song I had not expected to accompany, but was delighted to when asked and we rehearsed it a little in the sound check. This arrangement had Ruth & Sally [vocals] who created some arabic-sounding melodies, which I augmented with some twinkly cymbal playing and Doors-like tom-toms, Tony [guitar & vocals] was joined by [Pete] Sol i think was still on bass... In the recording you can clearly hear a conversation near the microphone, which rather spoiled the resulting recording. My fault for leaving the device in the wrong place really.

Southern Man was more of a rock-out number and featured Sally & Ruth [vocals] with Tony [guitar & lead vocal] It also had a short electric guitar solo, and ended with a vocals-only-in-harmony coda, in which we dropped out the bass and drums.

Finally, we began to play Ohio, which I think had the wrong chords on the intro, so Sol and I were looking at each other but it rather threw me, also the guitar wasn't up enough in the mix, so perhaps the sound engineer was having a nap!

A thoroughly enjoyable evening all round though and a marvellous Bristol debut for me. A big thankyou to all the musicians who took part and to Jesse and John for their efforts to organise the evening :-)